


Employee Engagement

by Celia_and



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Office, Awkward Ben Solo, Ben is desperately eager to please and just the absolute sweetest, Employee surveys, F/M, Fluff, One Shot, Sassy Rey (Star Wars), Sweet Ben Solo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-23 13:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23179006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and
Summary: The HR survey that Rey takes actually seems more like a list of first date questions.Ben Solo works in HR.Coincidence? ...Maybe.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 82
Kudos: 888





	Employee Engagement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katieitsmee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katieitsmee/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Мотивация персонала](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23319082) by [Elafira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elafira/pseuds/Elafira)



> Just a little story I wrote on Twitter based on a [real workplace survey](https://twitter.com/katieitsmee/status/1235692920826707968)!
> 
> If you're reading on a phone, please turn it sideways to read the survey screenshots.
> 
> Katie, dear, you are the absolute best and I love you forever! 🤗💛

* * *

Rey doesn’t think it’s just her imagination that Ben Solo is smiling a lot more, lately. Whenever they run into each other in the break room or he stops by her cubicle to ask for help with the eternally glitchy HR database, he seems to make it a point to smile. Often.

It’s still jarring, seeing a smile on that preternaturally pensive face. It’s not too shabby without a smile: the strong jaw, the plush lips, the soulful eyes. But with a smile is a whole other thing entirely. His eyes light up in an awkwardly, hesitantly eager way. It’s...nice.

She mentions it to Finn one day. “So Ben seems happier lately, huh?”

“Ben who?”

“Ben. HR Ben.”

_“Happy?”_ he scoffs skeptically. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happy in the whole entire course of my existence.”

“The smiling didn’t tip you off?”

“I’m concerned about you, Rey.”

“What? Why?”

He lays the back of his hand on her forehead, checking for a fever. “A hallucination of HR Ben smiling seems like a very odd presentation of a brain tumor.”

She guffaws, swats his hand away, pokes him in the side for good measure, and reluctantly wraps up her twenty-six-minute afternoon coffee break.

She watches Ben even more closely after that.

She’s not crazy. She doesn’t have a brain tumor.

He’s _definitely_ smiling.

* * *

They have a common enemy: the accursed, outdated HR database that the company in its infinite penny-pinching wisdom has decided to use until it’s entirely obsolete. Which milestone came and went three months ago, but Rey keeps patching it up to limp along a while longer.

She’s just scored a major victory—a patchwork fix that might hold a whole _week_ —and goes to share her triumph with Ben.

“That’s great, Rey!” he exclaims. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles, am I right?”

It could be a reference to something, maybe? But Ben is exactly eccentrically erudite enough that that might just be how he thinks.

So she answers, “Heck yes, that’s true!”

He smiles his biggest smile yet.

* * *

Finn takes to reading world news, and a week in, he’s decided it’s his civic duty to pass on his newfound and infinite wisdom to Rey and Poe. In the break room at lunch one day he’s holding forth passionately on the subject of Myanmar. His explanations are at times contradictory and he doesn’t seem to have a particularly firm grasp on dates or geography, but Rey and Poe are engrossed. They don’t even notice the presence of another coworker until Rey hears a murmured “Mm hmm” of agreement behind her.  


She turns in her chair and sees Ben holding his brown paper bag lunch. He never eats in the break room, he always takes his lunch from the fridge straight back to his desk, so this is unprecedented. Finn stops his recitation, and Poe turns to look.

With three pairs of surprised eyes on him, Ben turns slightly red but holds his ground. “I agree, widespread extermination of native peoples, that is to say, genocide...is bad.”

They all three just stare at him for a minute.

Rey finally scrapes her thoughts together enough to respond, “Absolutely, Ben.”

After the initial shock, Finn is delighted to have found a kindred world-news spirit and adds, “Preach!”  Poe hums in decided agreement.

Ben doesn’t smile—the occasion is far too solemn—but he does give a little nod before he leaves. Holding the brown paper bag that looks too small in his too-big hand.  Rey doesn’t know where the sudden urge comes from, to go after him. She feels cheated—unreasonably disappointed that he didn’t give her one of his smiles. She wants that from him.

(And maybe just a tiny corner of the wanting is for his hand.)  


* * *

A box of tissues mysteriously shows up on her desk. At first she assumes it’s part of a company-wide initiative to combat hand-based nose wiping, but hers is the only desk that gets one. Maybe it’s an oddly passive-aggressive, slightly lame prank. She doesn’t mind; she feels very civilized gracefully depositing her used chewing gum into a tissue instead of orally launching it directly across her cubicle into the trash can. (It’s not quite as viscerally satisfying, though.)  


One morning in the break room, twenty minutes into a fifteen-minute break, Rey and Finn are listening to Poe enthuse about his new dog when Ben comes in.  “He only peed inside five times yesterday, which is only two more times than the day before! Unrelated: can either of you recommend a good carpet cleaner?”

Ben interrupts, shooting a furtive glance at Rey. “Poe, is this really workplace-appropriate conversation?”

Poe looks genuinely confused. “It’s against HR policy for me to talk about...my dog?”

“You never know,” Ben says. “It might be a sore subject for someone. Not everyone likes dogs.”

“O...kay?” Poe responds. “I’ll consider in the future that descriptions of cute puppies might be...traumatic, for my friends.”

“Thank you,” Ben says gratefully. He pours himself a mug of coffee as the other three gawk silently. On his way out, he throws Rey a small, shy smile.

She smiles back bemusedly, and waits until he’s out of earshot to whirl around to Finn. “You saw that, right?! He _totally_ smiled!”

Finn just answers with a singsong “Brain tumor!”

By the end of the week, Rey is actually willing to admit that maybe she _should_ schedule a visit with a neurologist, because she thinks she sees Ben walk by her cubicle conspicuously holding what looks like a yoga mat.  It can’t be a yoga mat, though, because the idea of Ben Solo and the concept of yoga are so fundamentally at odds that try as Rey might, she can’t imagine his limbs cooperating with what the practice would require of them. (She’d _very_ much like to see him try, though. And not just for the comedic possibilities.)

Work is so hectic that her fifteen-minute break is actually only fifteen minutes, and she resigns herself shortly before five o'clock to the prospect of working late.  The upside of the Friday evening work is that it entirely drives the bizarre hallucination out of her mind until she hears a throat cleared behind her. When she turns around her first reaction is relief: she isn’t dying after all! Ben is in fact holding a yoga mat. It’s lilac.

“Oh hey, Rey,” he says in an exceptionally casual tone.

“Hey, Ben.”

He shifts the mat under his arm.

“Going to yoga?”

“Oh, yeah!” he exclaims with an air of studied surprise, like he wants her to think he’d completely forgotten about the mat he’s carrying.  “I haven’t been doing it long, but I really find that it helps keep me centered. Or balanced? Yeah.”

“That’s great, Ben, I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”

He moves the mat from under one arm to the other. It peels off his skin like maybe it was stuck on with sweat. “Do you like yoga?” he asks.

“I’ve never done it,” Rey confesses. “I don’t know if I’d have the patience.”

“You... _what_?” His level of shock seems fairly extreme for such an unremarkable confession. “You’ve never done yoga?”

“Nope,” she answers, unconcerned.  


“Oh, huh.” He stops and thinks for a minute. The silence stretches on and she’s debating introducing a new topic of conversation when he does it himself. “Have you ever been to Ohio?”

“No,” she answers, “I can’t say that I have.” Though now that he mentions it, there’s something oddly familiar about the idea of Ohio...something connected to yoga somehow? And maybe puppies?

When the realization hits her, she _gasps_. “The survey!”

She stares at him slack-jawed as everything clicks into place. The smiling. The Machiavelli quote. The tissue box. The dog thing. “Genocide is bad.” _The yoga mat_.

“Ben, did you by chance read my responses to the employee engagement survey?”

It looks like it doesn’t even occur to him to lie. He reddens and nods.

“Wait,” she tries to recall. “Wasn’t there another question on it?”

“Well...”

“BEN. You’re not going to offer me your _car_ , are you?”

“No!” he exclaims hastily. “But my uncle has a dealership, and I know a lot about cars, so if you’re looking for something with a good safety rating, I could help...” He trails off.

“Ben, I was 100% messing around with that survey. It was set up as a required step to log in and fill out your timesheet, and every answer was mandatory, and I do enjoy this job on the whole, but not enough to do it without getting paid. I made that stuff up.”

He deflates. “Oh.”

She feels like she has to replay every minute of the month that’s passed since she took that survey, to know him. “You saw my responses? And you read the book I said I'd read?”

“Mm hmm.”

“You watched Pocahontas II?”

“I did, and Rey, it was _so_ bad, but I thought it was your favorite, so...”

“Yeah, it’s pretty widely accepted as one of the worst animated sequels of all time, I put it down as kind of a joke.”

“I’m sorry,” he answers. “I’m not good at this.”

“At what?”

“At getting jokes. I think I take things too seriously.”

She pauses and considers. “You brought me tissues because you thought I cried a lot. You smiled because you thought it was my mission in life to make people happy. You thought I...kick puppies?”

“No,” he answers hurriedly, “I knew that was an exaggeration. But I thought maybe there was some reason you didn’t like dogs.”

“So you stood up to Poe, for me.”

“Now I feel stupid, Rey, I didn’t...”

“Don’t.” She cuts him off swiftly. “Don’t feel stupid. Ben, you...you bought a yoga mat.”

“The mat was the easy part, actually, it was hard to find a studio close by.”

“Wait. You actually started _taking_ yoga?” There’s a warm sort of glow that begins somewhere in the region of her chest and gradually starts spreading to her extremities. “You...you did all that, for me?”

He looks perplexed by the question. “Well, of course.” His voice washes over her, and she only vaguely hears it. “I wanted to get to know you better. So of course I did the things that I thought you liked and would like to talk about.”

She stands up, slowly, and takes a step toward him. “Ask me a question.”

“What?”  


She takes another step. “You can ask me any question you want, and I’ll answer honestly.”

“Oh!” His brow furrows as he thinks. “I don’t know.”

Another step. “Go on, Ben,” she prompts softly. “What do you want to ask?”

He’s squeezing the yoga mat like an oversized stress ball. “I don’t know,” he repeats.

She takes another step, and she could count on one hand, probably, the number of inches left between them. “Yes, you do.”

He takes a deep breath. “Do you like me, a little?” He stands petrified, awaiting her answer.  


She looks up into his eyes and she smiles. “I like you more than a little.”

All the tension in the world leaves his shoulders. The yoga mat is released from its death grip. “Okay.” He smiles. “That’s good. Okay.”

“Do you want to ask me another question?” she asks, softly.

He gulps. “Yes.”

“Ask me.”

“I want to kiss you.”

She smiles. “That’s not a question.”

“Oh sorry, do you...”

She cuts him off with her mouth. Her arms loop over his shoulders, and the yoga mat falls on her foot as his hands find her back. She glues herself to him and still can’t get close enough. His touch is everything, and the solid warmth of his body, and the way he kisses: unpracticed and enthusiastic and like he’ll never, ever tire of her lips. It's everything, and then some.

When she finally pulls back to breathe, he automatically tries to follow, as if he’s forgotten that he too needs oxygen. Or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t need it right now as much as he needs her. He draws back and gives her the smile that she wanted. That she _always_ wants, she realizes.

_Cherished_. The long-unused word comes to mind. No one has ever made her feel cherished, in the way that he is now, holding her carefully in his arms like she’s something precious.  


“Can I ask _you_ a question?” she murmurs.

“Of course,” he smiles.

“I want to kiss you again.”

“That’s not a ques— OH.” It takes him a second, but he gets there.

And she’s right there waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this made you smile! 😊 I post other drabbles and such on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/CeliaAnd2) if you'd like to come visit! 💛


End file.
